The complexity of getting any services for retired people who aren’t familiar with the constantly changing technology is aimed at excluding them from welfare. It’s a standard neoliberal move. Old age requires a lot of welfare protection, and that’s annoying to neoliberals. I’ve noticed this on my trip to Canada where I have three retired relatives. I helped them renew their dental cards and noticed that it would have been very onerous for them without a younger person to do the online renewal.
13 responses to “Old Age Welfare”
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It is similar even with programs aimed at younger people.
Our experience with signing up for WIC, plus brief stint working in the benefits office… the electronic application process is so poorly designed it is not really possible to get through it successfully without the office staff helping, even if you are reasonably intelligent. Forget most of the poor schmos who *need* this stuff longterm. They haven’t got a chance.
We could not figure out whether it was incompetence and lack of QA in the software design, that then was never fixed because that would require a new contract, or perhaps there was no effort to fix it because it was serving the useful purpose of excluding applicants who were not willing or able to come down to the office in person every time there was a form to fill out. At least in the local office, it does seem to weed out a certain number of scammers, while ticking the tickbox that says “accessible online”
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In Canada, even the banking system is like this. In order to access her own bank account, my mother has to receive a phone call, press a constantly changing number of buttons, hear a code, write it down, enter it on the website, and do all this in an amount of time that an older, unwell person can’t always manage. Every single time she has to do it, and the procedure keeps changing. All this, just to access her own money.
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yeesh. What happens if you’re deaf?
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P.S. What I hear from locals who *do* actually need these programs is that the welfare office ladies use this feature to discriminate against *white people*. If you could actually apply online you could simply choose not to state your race in the form. But since you have to come into the office to do anything, ultimately it is the office ladies who get to decide if you’re eligible or not. Anecdata and unprovable, of course.
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I don’t even know that there is that much intentional ill intent behind some of this stuff. Spouse works in healthcare and deals directly with patients struggling with some of this tech stuff. Spouse reports that the people in charge of the tech are all young, upper-middle class, and well-educated, they are always surprised when they roll out new features and patients have problems and complaints. They are mostly just oblivious to the fact that not everyone is like them. They also refuse to listen to the warnings of the front line workers who caution them about making changes too fast.
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I agree that this is not conscious. It’s more of a Zeitgeist kind of thing. More technology is always good. More change is also always good. Change, change, change. Pivot, pivot, pivot. Whoever can’t adapt gets discarded.
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There’s that. Quite a lot of slick electronic interface stuff designed by and for smart engineer people… for use by impaired and not-so-smart populations, just ends up being an extra job that nurses, office staff, social workers, or harried relatives have to do, without any extra pay for getting roped into this thing that isn’t in their job description.
When we were using WIC checks, I saw it constantly– over-complex programs/interfaces to help under-complex people. We lived in a poor area, lots of 22yo moms in the grocery checkout, trying to figure out how much produce before they went over 9 dollars, which checks expired when… maybe 50% were not up to the challenge*, and needed a store employee to help them. There wasn’t always one available, and when there was… it was the store paying for that assistance.
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Well, Clarissa’s comments about both the bureaucracy and bankers in the Great White North are absolutely true. When my wife passed, I had to deal with both. The pension plan has a death benefit to help cover burial costs. To receive it a spouse must present a copy of the marriage certificate, now how many aggrieved spouses can even find it. If you ask for assistance you are directed to a bureaucrat in Quebec, whose English is worse than my French, and has absolutely no sympathetic for les maudits Anglais or worse, given my name, L’Ecotais sauvage. I asked what happened if we had been common law, well then a letter was all that was required ;-D
As the beneficiary, I also needed to transfer her retirement pension plans into mine, most were no problem. Most people grasp that grieving spouses have enough misery on their hands, but the Royal Bank had noticed that when my lte wife had shifted one holding into another but had not named a beneficiary. Resolving that took eight years and forty eleven phone calls, both local and long distance. It was finally resoved when an angered local assistant superviser found a pair and told Toronto that this behavior was costing business, wherupon I got a call from a pleasant women in Miramichi saying the money was transfered ;-D
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True. It’s absolute torture for a bereaved widow with cancer (my mother) to have to go through these rings of hell to prove that her husband who died 3 years ago us still very much dead. What it cost us to get the death certificate – after the bureaucrats kept misspelling his name – and prove they were married (with a marriage certificate issued in the USSR, a country that no longer exists), I won’t narrate because life is too short. We are still undergoing this process, and now I have to provide my marriage certificate, and I was also married in another country, so that’s an additional wrinkle. This is sheer, unadulterated lunacy. My mother breaks down every time she has to repeat to get another bureaucrat “my husband is dead.”
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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